The Lost Moon utilised the combined talents of three experienced practitioners and so, as you’d expect, the show’s technical aspects were highly accomplished: Hannah Marshall’s atmospheric cello accompaniment seamlessly meshed with Mandy Travis’s confident handling of the puppets, both under the direction of Nino Namitcheishvili, founder member of The Georgian Puppeteers’ Club and director, performer and puppeteer at The Basement Theatre in Tbilisi. The story, an old English tale from the fens, was one of fear, ignorance, then reconciliation. The puppets were strangely crafted, almost inhuman creatures: yokels that looked like upright turtles with a leering, leaning perspective. The puppetry, and the characters’ slow distinctive country speech, peppered with repetitions of ‘aye’ and ‘’appen’, had a good, well-paced humour. Other parts of the show used shadow puppetry and light to contrast and break up the slower rhythm of the basic story – but at an hour long the narrative did feel quite slow.

The symbolism of the loss of the moon, the guiding light in the treacherous mists of the fens, came across with strength and beauty. When Lucas the wandering lampman took off across the fens without a light, this was a metaphor of courage and loss that stayed with the audience. And there were genuinely chilling moments when the three yokels dismembered the puppet cow in a naive act of ignorance (a simple disassembly of parts on the stage an evocation of greater slaughter). I felt it could have had more pace, but it has stayed with me as a strange and meditative piece of storytelling.